August Blue

Critics Review

• Deborah Levy’s new novel is both intelligent and absurd, precise and dream-like . . . I know of few other authors who can capture an atmosphere of the eerie and the bizarre as well as she does. Her novels have a strange clarity and precision about being nebulous and shifting

  The Scotsman

• August Blue holds the remarkable balancing act that is key to Levy’s writing: perfect precision at the sentence level combined with a dedication to exploring the slipperiness of reality . . . August Blue is full of such delightfully strange moments – and it is these that linger long in the mind

  i

• Playful inquisitiveness and lush descriptions balance out a bassline of melancholy . . . Nobody does enigmatic like Levy

  Mail on Sunday

• August Blue is Levy’s eighth novel, and since her 20s, she has been refining her ability to evoke feeling through writing rather than to narrate it. Her work is deeply influenced by art forms that express the embodied experience, like cinema and dance . . . Levy’s writing is psychologically complex

  New York Times

• [Levy] can sketch a scene with a few precise brushstrokes and conjure emotion out of white space on the page. A recurring call and response between Elsa and her alter ego becomes a musical refrain that takes on ever new colors. Those familiar references to swimming and bees glint through like leitmotifs

  New York Times

• A gleeful read . . . [Deborah Levy’s] prose is as quick and bare as ever, her manner excitingly abrupt . . . You know you’ll read August Blue again

  Guardian

• Levy’s lyrical, pitch-perfect prose, where every word is weighted with significance, is an exploration of our reasons for living, the forces that drive us and the inner music that controls the rhythms of our dance through life and love

  Independent

• Deborah Levy’s work inspires a devotion few literary authors ever achieve

  Guardian

• [An] enigmatic novel . . . Deborah Levy’s writing is rather like Philip Glass’s music . . . mesmerising . . . enigmatic . . . refreshingly original

  Daily Telegraph

• [A] wistful, fabular new novel . . . Since the 1990s, Deborah Levy’s novels have combined a gauzy, episodic quality with pinpoint sensual detail drawn from peripatetic lives, crossing fluently between languages and national borders. Her style is full of gaps and sharp edges, circling around questions of gender and power, inheritance, autonomy and lack . . . The narrative here has a fittingly musical quality, running forward in spurts, pausing, repeating key phrases

  Observer

• A meditation on artistic creativity that is sensual, enigmatic and strangely addictive

  Financial Times 'What to Read this Summer'

• Deborah Levy’s hazy, dreamlike novels, often set in sun-drenched Mediterranean backdrops, are an essential accompaniment to any summer holiday . . . a lyrical, surreal trip of self discovery – one that is full of Levy’s wit and curious images

  i

• Deborah Levy is no stranger to the uncanny. Her novels teem with oddness, with dreamlike, vertiginous scenes . . . Angst and profound loss shape the lives of her protagonists . . . This is not a long book, but Levy is such a clever writer, her plot so immaculately packed, that August Blue reads like a weighty one . . . The latest novel is about death and loss, and what happens when those closest to us die. We see them everywhere, in shadows, in strangers, in visions in the dark. When they have gone we cannot help but wonder who they really were. Without them we question, too, who we really are

  Times Literary Supplement

• Levy’s elegantly ludic investigation into selfhood, mother love and meaning

  Guardian, '2023 Summer Reads'